to fulfill a dream of generations The Great Houses that rebelled made a disastrous miscalculation The old Impenum had regarded political ambition as a constant of human nature Punishments for failed plots had never been intended to wipe out such ambition through seventy, rather, whatever harshness had characterized the sanctions for unsuccessful grasps at power had been de signed to delay and weaken the next outstretched hand This is not to make House Comno a collection of philanthropic phi losophers-it is only to see them as realists The Sardaukar were the instruments of these realists and their source The first emperor had been a Sardaukar, and since then they FREMEN JIHAD 233 FREMEN JIHAD had followed the Imperial House out of the most intense combination of self-interest and ingrained loyalty But once the threat of the Sardaukar was removed any Great House would naturally lunge at the opportunity to declare its own independence and would in fact think of becoming the Imperial House itself None of them expected to be anmhilat ed for this They were acting as their experience of centuries taught them they should and the House Comno would not have expected anything else But they misunderstood their new op ponents What seemed to the Great Houses to be a matter of politics was, to the Fremen, in the province of religion The leaders of the Great Houses saw themselves as taking advantage of a moment of political flux, the Fremen saw unbelievers defying their Mahdi To the Fremen, rebellion against Paul Muad'Dib was an attack oa the Messiah, promised them for thousands of years, and now come The Fremen followed Paul out of a religious belief buttressed by a desire for vengeance upon the Harkormens and the Impenum, which had oppressed them from time immemorial-immemorial for all but them It was their traditions, and their religion, which turned a war to consolidate control of an empire into a Jihad The conquest of the system of Malathon, controlled by the Great House of the Mc-Naughts was the first tnkhng the universe had that the rules of empire had changed The McNaughts were one of the most powerful of the old Great Houses, and the family had a tradition of cautious, shrewd leadership, along with a reputation is a dangerous enemy The McNaught forces were sizeable and well trained, in Landsraad terms, they were supported by three lesser houses from the neighboring system of Kalakh The stones spread by the few hundred survivors of the battles for Malathon and Kalakh shocked all who heard them The forces of the McNaughts and their allies had been obliterated What made the news border on the incredible was that this had been accomplished with a force of ten Fremen legions-some 300,000 men The entire armed might of two systems had been wiped out by a force less man one tenth tts size Had the remaining Great Houses but known it there was more to fear these victories had been accomplished without the Fedaykm At this early